Nonesuch

  It took a moment for me to realise that they were seeing me in my wild form, which no human should ever witness: it upsets their sense of their place in the world.

  It took another moment after that to recognise them as Anna and the man from the church, who smiled and was kind to us cats, but who had lately begun to smell very odd. I turned at once and leapt back into the highway from which I had issued.

  *

  That night the dreams came thick and fast. The folk of Ashmore were beset by nightmares of rot and pain, and the taste of them was bitter. But still I did my job. My old grandfather would have been proud of me, I thought. I dragged the last of the smoking dream globes down from the roof of the wild road and trod upon it hard. It squirmed beneath my toes, but I was used to that. The first dreams I had caught, under Hawkweed’s stern eye, had disconcerted me with their writhings and attempts to escape – I had lost more than one of them into the highway winds and had to chase them like a fool – but I was rather more proficient now. I bent my head to the gelatinous casing and bit into it so that its liquids spilled out over my toes in a hot gush. I knew now that the solution in which the dream swam was not the crucial element; rather, it was the matter of the thing that must be despatched before it could flee out on to the wild roads. I examined the contents. Another corpse dream: this time a woman, standing over her own dead self, her face a mask of disgust and panic. Such a fear of death that humans have. Such a horror of the grave. It is so easy for the cruel to terrorise them. I was almost beginning to feel affectionate towards the people of the village, for they were my charges and I their guardian: to me fell the task of keeping them safe from the harms that came by night. I remembered my grandfather making pronouncements like this, and had always thought him arrogant and self-deluded for doing so. But now I saw the truth of it and for the first time in my life I felt as if my role of Dreamcatcher of Ashmore held something of value after all. It was a strange feeling. I ate the dream down, corpse, woman and all; and just as I was swallowing the last morsels a great wind came and with it something that roared past, scorching the very tips of my ears.

  My head shot up at once. There, in the ceiling of the highway, a fiery dream globe blazed and hissed. It had an aura of dark-red flames that shaded almost to black where they joined the main sac and glowed an incandescent white at the head of each leaping tongue. It hovered overhead as if to taunt me; then, against all possibility, turned once more into the howling wind and headed back in the direction from which it had come.

  Every time it got out of my sight I would round a corner and there it would be, idling its time as if waiting for me to catch it up, bobbing in the turbulence overhead. Yet as soon as I leapt to catch it, it would disentangle itself from the twisting energies of the highway and dodge away from me to continue its journey.

  I trailed it all the way back to Nonesuch. There, the highways made their usual weird, contorted transitions through the history of the house. I glimpsed previous incarnations of rooms as I ran: windows shuttered and curtained; undraped and broken with the moon shining through on to dust and dereliction; chandeliers and candlelight; people dancing across rich carpets; banqueting at long tables; couples grappling with one another in dark corners, bent over furniture, on all fours on the bare floor. I saw cats, too – real cats and ghost cats – a skein of life winding its way between the human inhabitants. Some watched the people with undisguised curiosity; some sat nervously grooming themselves, ears twitching, ready for flight; others were more shade than substance, their eyes wide and haunted. After a while I realised that one of them, amidst this tide of events, was always still and as solid as myself.

  It was a neat-looking tabby cat with a slightly ragged ear. ‘You’d better hurry,’ it said, ‘or you’ll lose your dream. It would be a shame to come so far and then fail, wouldn’t it, Orlando?’

  It was Vita.

  ‘She didn’t boil you, then, the witch?’ I found myself asking stupidly.

  ‘She’d like to,’ Vita said. ‘Isn’t it what she does with all cats?’

  ‘Can’t you come with me?’

  Vita shook her head sadly. ‘The highways are all tangled up. The Great Knot is tightening. You have to eat the dreams, Orlando, or I’ll be tied right up in the middle of it. Now hurry after the dream. She’s drawing it to the courtyard.’

  I must have looked puzzled, for she added, ‘The one with the cages. Where the witch kept her breeding females.’ Her eyes went misty and her voice dropped almost to a whisper. ‘I saw Mother there. She was pregnant with us, but she knew me all the same. “Tell Orlando I’m very proud of him,” she said. Then she added, “He will avenge us all.’”

  I stared blankly at her for a moment, trying to digest this latest strangeness, but she got up and, with a flick and a twist of her now adult body, dived into a tributary of the wild roads that made up this part of the Great Knot.

  *

  I followed the main highway along the Long Corridor, to the room where one wall had been painted with a garden scene. There, the walls were flushed with jumping red light and I knew I had found my prey. It was waiting for me there, unsteady with some trapped emotion, some intention to wound and damage. As I entered the room, it swooped down like a hawk and set my mane alight. Suddenly, my head was engulfed in fire. I couldn’t think straight. I could feel my heart thundering in my chest, as the awful smell of burning hair brought back to me the memory of the last fire I had been in – in this very house, this very spot almost, the winter before last, when the witch had burned along with many of her cats. I had barely made it out alive. So it thought to burn me, did it? We’d see about that. A combination of fury and smoke was making my eyes water: I blinked fiercely, but by the time my vision was clear, all I could see was the dream coming at me again. This time I gave a mighty leap and pinioned it between both front paws. Even with the flames blazing into my scalp, I held on for grim death.

  The dream twisted in my grip like a maddened rat. It was horribly strong. Just as I thought I had the better of it, it drew away from me so hard that I thought my teeth would be pulled from my head. Over and over we tumbled, until I was not sure where I was; all I could see was the blur of the dream sac before my eyes and a wild mist of dark smoke. I could smell myself burning: not just the awful acridity of charred hair, but the sweeter smell of scorching flesh. With all the effort I could muster, I bit harder and after what seemed an age, the dream made a sighing sound and relinquished a gush of sticky liquid that burst out over my head, extinguishing the flames in my mane.

  I threw it down then, as roughly as I could, and trapped it between my paws. I snarled at it; I roared my hatred and triumph as I felt its life force dwindling. At last it gave up its contents to me. A man sat in one of the upstairs rooms at Nonesuch on a tall chair. His dark hair was caught back in a tail; but I knew him instantly as John, or some earlier version of John, even though he had his back to me. He was hunched over, his right hand working with a fine brush at a tiny oval picture. Beyond him, where rays of pale afternoon light filtered through the thick diamond panes to illuminate the far side of the room, I could see the head and shoulder of a woman, framed by a fall of long black hair. I pushed my head further into the dream, the better to understand what I was seeing.

  The man was painting: a tiny portrait of a young woman, richly dressed. He worked with his face close to the painting, adding minute strokes of colour to a glorious brocade robe. Without the brown and crackled patina it had acquired over the intervening centuries, the detail of the work was miraculous. I moved in closer, for something nagged at me, something out of true; and there, beyond him on a plush settee, sat the witch.

  Naked and wrinkled she was, and as old as the hills, her skin stretched tightly across her thin frame like the skin on a chicken’s carcass. Her lips were moving, for she talked soft and low to him throughout this whole procedure, and her eyes – as green as a spell – never left his face. In her lap there cowered two kittens, a pale blue-grey. She held th
em tightly around their necks, so that they struggled for air. Their little eyes bulged with panic. One of them managed to free a tiny paw and strike out at its captor, drawing a long thin line of red across the back of her hand. The witch swore in fury and looked down at her wound.

  As soon as her gaze was averted from him, the man stirred from his stuporous task, looked up and shook his head. He seemed confused, disorientated. He glanced once at the woman on the settle in front of him, then down at the painting he had made. He frowned and opened his mouth to speak, but at that moment the witch looked up and said something to him and he settled back to his task without a word.

  Then those wicked green eyes met mine, and she said something to me and laughed, showing me her empty gums. There was a thin wail, a sickening crunching sound, and then silence. I dragged my eyes from her face. The kitten that had scratched her lay limp as a rag in her lap, its head skewed awkwardly, its neck broken.

  With a rage I had not known I could summon, I opened my jaws wide and flew at her. With fangs and claws I tore at her and the rest of the fabric of the dream until there was nothing of it left.

  Then I lay where I was in a daze.

  *

  When I finally came back to myself, I was lying in a room I had not seen before. It was roughly circular in design and white, with thick plasterwork into which small holes appeared to have been hollowed out, and someone seemed to have been storing odd bits and pieces in these rough niches. I went up to one wall where the plaster was coming away to reveal patches of shining rock and sniffed cautiously. Back came the age-old scent, the aroma of mulch and leaf mould, water upon stone, that I had smelled not so very long before. But now, instead of the pitch darkness I had endured here when the candles were burned out, the room was illuminated by a single shaft of pale moonlight from a small hole high up in the roof, out of which a slow drift of soil was falling. Another time entirely, I thought; and when I looked down at the ground, I found that my paws were no longer those of a lion, foursquare and great-clawed, but those of a cat and a filthy one at that. The wild road which had caught me and the dream in its toils had spewed us out on its contorted passage and left us here, in the White Lady’s room. A huge, complicated knot pattern covered most of the surface of the floor and at one end, where the gloom deepened, I could just make out the first steps of what appeared to be a narrow staircase. A later addition, I thought disconnectedly, made when the house was built to enable the witch to come and go in peace. I was about to see where the stairs would take me, when there was a great commotion overhead, followed by a small avalanche of earth. Then a pair of child’s hands – incongruously white – appeared through the hole in the ceiling, followed by Eleanor’s head.

  Her eyes gleamed as she saw me. ‘Ca’!’ she cried, and, ‘kill you!’

  She lurched down, her face demonic with triumph at having cornered me at last; then her expression changed to one of panic. ‘No, Mummy, no!’ she shouted, and there was a struggle in which Ellie appeared to be the loser, for a moment later she was visibly hauled backwards. With fury, she waved her arms around. Something flew out of her hand and struck the ground a few feet away from me. A second afterwards she was gone and the moonlight filtered down, serene and uninterrupted.

  I approached the object with a heavy heart. I already knew what it would be. There it lay, face up in the dust and cobwebs: a tiny miniature painting encased in silver. Under its cracked brown glaze a pale, tranquil girl in a rich robe sat with her hands lying in her lap, demurely clutching a pair of soft grey gloves.

  15

  Six thirty in the morning and Anna Dawe, wearing a ‘Green World’ T-shirt tucked into a pair of oil-stained Levis rather too large for her, had stopped to use the toilet in a Little Chef on the main road about thirty miles west of London. Commuter traffic was beginning to build up on the dual carriageway outside, but as yet the restaurant was empty except for a man in a business suit warming his hands on his cup and smiling wanly out of the steamed-up windows at the rain. Anna sat where she could keep an eye on the Volvo and ordered tea, with a double chocolate muffin and a newspaper she would eventually leave on the table unopened. Every time a car pulled into the car park outside she looked up, expecting to see her husband getting out of a silver-grey Mercedes. This was unfair, she knew.

  Eleanor, who had fallen into a kind of exhausted trance the moment they were away from Nonesuch, now sat obediently in the high chair provided, gazing round at the fairyland of the Little Chef, which she described to herself in hushed and confidential whispers —‘…an’ flahrs,’ she said. ‘Flahrs.’

  She was dressed in the motley of bits and pieces Anna kept in the Volvo for emergencies. Her cheeks were flushed, and there was a stain on the front of her OshKosh dungarees where she had thrown up in a fit of rage, but at least she was speaking in her own voice again. Anna, whose memory of the night’s other voices was unpleasantly clear, thought. If I can get her right away from that place she’ll stop it. She’ll stop doing those things and just be an ordinary little girl again. As a corollary, she thought. Something awful is going on back there. I can save us, but I can’t save John. The bleakness of this went through her like a crack in glass. Everything he was, everything they had ever been to one another, seemed to fill her – until she was like a tumbler of cold, clear water on a summer afternoon – then, in the same instant, drain away again. How she would spend the rest of her life without him, she couldn’t imagine.

  This decision, already made a dozen times, gave her no comfort. She considered it for a moment or two, then drank the rest of her tea as quickly as she could. There was nothing else to be done. ‘Come on, miss,’ she said, lifting her daughter unceremoniously out of the high chair and going up to pay.

  Eleanor waited until they were at the cash desk, then began to shriek at the top of her voice, clutching piteously at the hands of the woman behind the till. ‘Dada!’ she cried. ‘My Dada!’

  Anna managed to laugh. ‘What can you do with them when they’re like this?’ she asked.

  ‘I’m sure I don’t know, dear,’ came the bland reply. ‘They’re a lot of effort at that age, aren’t they?’

  Anna nodded hastily. ‘Yes, oh yes. Yes, they are.’

  ‘She looks tired if you ask me,’ said the woman at the till, eyeing Anna’s clothes. ‘Was everythink all right for you?’

  ‘It was very nice, thanks.’

  Anna filled the Volvo’s cavernous tank with petrol. She cleaned its windscreen. She sat in the driver’s seat with the engine turned off and thought, I can’t save him. Not when he insists there’s nothing to be saved from. I really can’t. Then she put the Volvo in gear and drove out into the traffic, where instead of taking the carriageway to complete the journey to London she performed an illegal U-turn and, to the accompaniment of blaring horns and shouts of rage, turned back towards Ashmore.

  By the time she got there Eleanor had fallen sound asleep in her car seat and the rain had turned to a kind of Scotch mist, a thickening of the air that left tiny cold beads of moisture on everything it touched. Low cloud lay along the edge of the downs. The village street was quiet, the churchyard grey and sodden. Anna let the Volvo coast to a halt and switched off the engine. Silence, but for the muffled call of a rook. She sat there tiredly for a moment, thinking. This is the right thing. It’s the right thing to do. Then she got out and went round to the passenger side to try to extract the car seat without waking Eleanor.

  Francis Baynes must have heard the Volvo arrive, because when she looked up he was already opening the rectory door.

  Anna waved. ‘Hello!’ she called.

  *

  Francis seemed tired and nervous. He hadn’t shaved and he was still in the clothes he had worn at Cresset Beacon the afternoon before.

  ‘You look worse than I do,’ she said. ‘Can I come in?’

  ‘No. No, I don’t think that would be a good thing.’

  ‘Francis?’

  He managed a smile. ‘After yesterday,’
he said quietly, ‘it wouldn’t feel—’ He shrugged. ‘Well, it wouldn’t feel like the best idea.’

  ‘You’re taking this too much to heart,’ she told him. ‘You mustn’t be silly.’ His expression made her add, ‘I’m sorry. That was patronising.’ She put Eleanor carefully down on the front step and took one of his hands in hers. It was so cold that the touch of it threw everything else out of her mind. ‘My God, Francis,’ she said, ‘you’re freezing. Are you all right?’

  ‘Quite all right, thanks.’

  ‘Do you ever heat this place?’ she asked. ‘Or don’t they give you any money for that, either?’ Tired, she saw now, wasn’t quite the word to describe him. It was more than that. All the youth – all the certainty – seemed to have leaked out of him. Had she done this? It was ridiculous. ‘Francis,’ she admonished him, ‘stop this. It was my fault. And it wasn’t anything anyway.’

  He withdrew his hand. ‘No,’ he said. ‘No, I see that, I quite see that.’

  He would have added more, she thought, and they might have got to some better understanding of how he felt, but at that moment two things happened. He seemed to hear something which caused him to turn round and look back into the house behind him. And at almost the same instant Eleanor made a small, fractious noise and stirred in the car seat at his feet. Waking up, she transfixed him with her bright green eyes. ‘Gidgiee,’ she announced.

  Francis looked startled. ‘Ah. The baby. Isn’t it rather damp for her to be out?’

  ‘They’re quite sturdy, Francis.’

  He smiled again. ‘So I’m told.’

  ‘She’s why I’ve come,’ Anna said. ‘Francis, I need you to look after her for an hour.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I can’t do that.’

  ‘Francis—’

  ‘No.’ He took a step or two backwards, shaking his head rapidly.

  Anna pursued him. ‘Francis! This is absurd.’